Before the Storm (80 page)

A compromise was finally micromanaged from the White House: the regular delegation would be seated representing Mississippi; the MFDP would be granted two “at-large” seats; future segregated delegations would be banned. “We didn't come all the way up here for no two seats!” cried Mrs. Hamer. Most of the regular Mississippi delegation boycotted rather than taking theirs. Later it would become clear that the arrangement was made at the expense of driving the flower of liberal youth from the Democratic Party; Fannie Lou Hamer was not the only civil rights activist to question America. Many were beginning to question the integrationist, nonviolent ideal altogether. “This proves the liberal Democrats are just as racist as Goldwater,” cried Stokely Carmichael, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Johnson, oblivious, blew into town in jubilant spirits to accept his crown at a united convention. But there was one more piece of business to take care of first: the evening's film, a soft-focus tribute to President Kennedy called A
Thousand Days.
Johnson had arranged to schedule it
after
the voting for the nomination. Bobby Kennedy would introduce the movie. Even more than to the MFDP activists, Johnson's FBI detail attended to his paranoid obsession that RFK was planning to stampede the convention for a Kennedy restoration. (In a clinical sense, Johnson's paranoia and bipolar tendencies bespoke far worse mental health than Goldwater's.)

RFK's introduction ended up confirming LBJ's fear. “When I think of President Kennedy, I think of what Shakespeare said...

The garish sun. It was hard not to see the reference to a certain uncouth Texan.

The movie ended, the lights went up, Bobby took the podium—and a gut-ripping ovation pealed for almost as long as the film itself. Grown men cried—as indeed, surveys showed, half of American men had cried after John F. Kennedy was shot. It made the President's acceptance speech—spoken under banners reading “LET US CONTINUE,” a cruel reminder of those old feelings of illegitimacy—to all accounts anticlimactic. And Lyndon Johnson redoubled his resolve to capture the biggest presidential landslide ever.

G
oldwater opened his campaign in Prescott, Arizona, a remote mountain town of 13,000 up near the Grand Canyon, because he always opened his campaigns there. It was the original Goldwater family seat, governed for twenty-six years by Morris Goldwater, Barry's uncle and political hero. Morris had built the courthouse from whose steps Barry would speak; ahead of him, bisecting the traditional village square, would be the equestrian statue that Uncle Morris had graciously put up to honor his political enemy—Bucky O'Neill, a populist rabble-rouser who died in Teddy Roosevelt's charge up San Juan Hill.

Or so local lore had it. Actually Bucky had been the victim of a sniper's bullet whilst relieving himself in a slit-trench latrine. In Prescott,
The Atlantic Monthly
claimed, “men with revolvers on their hips or rifles in their hands are a common sight.” They weren't. Prescott was like Barry Goldwater: its rough-rider image was a story the town told itself about itself. Prescott commemorated the world's first rodeo, held there in 1888, with a big-time parade each July 4, and each year its famous “Smoki Clan”—chamber of commerce types, including, most years, Barry Goldwater, who dressed up as Indians for fun and municipal profit—put on a solemn, foot-stomping display, carefully researched for “authenticity,” which they proudly labeled “the premier Indian Pageant of America.” On September 3 Prescott would be blending the two spectaculars, with its favorite son serving as Grand Marshal. Fifty thousand visitors were expected to show up. It would have been fantastic. If anything had gone according to plan.

Nobody bothered to check whether Prescott's airport had a runway big enough to accommodate the campaign's 727. (The passengers breathed a sigh of relief to find, upon landing, that it did.) A press room packed with typewriters and phones had been set up at the Westward Ho. But the reporters were staying at the
Valley
Ho. Then Goldwater's security detail—the events of
November 22 were still fresh in people's minds and there was a rumor that a roving gang of black militants was on its way into Prescott to join the fun—ruled it would be too dangerous for him to ride in the parade. Then the event was moved up two hours. But not in time to alert the newspapers. Only 4,000 visitors arrived in time to hear Goldwater give his speech.

It was a shame, because Goldwater was in rare form. He extended the olive branch he had withheld in San Francisco (the word “peace” was repeated twenty times). And he sharpened a theme that had run through his rhetoric like a red thread ever since he keened for the fate of the “whole man” in
Conscience
of
a Conservative
four years earlier. He used the story of his and his audience's pioneer forebears as the jumping-off point for his argument that the people of the nation were forgetting how to live lives of dignity, meaning, and autonomy. “There is a stir in the land,” he said, “a mood of uneasiness. We feel adrift in an uncharted and stormy sea. We feel that we have lost our way.” His campaign, he said, would aim America at a “greatness of soul—to restore inner meaning to every man's life in a time too often rushed, too often obsessed by petty needs and material greeds.”

James Reston mocked the message as an exercise in moral philosophy, not a political speech. He was unperceptive. The average American was now seventeen years old; 2.5 million new twenty-one-year-olds were being added to the voting rolls every year. For the first time on Planet Earth, a nation was made up of more college students than farmers. The dominance of this new generation—“The Pepsi Generation,” a certain beverage company called it; “the buyingest age group in history,” according to the Mustang's impresario, Lee Iacocca—was registering everywhere; that very month history was made when one of those goofy dance shows, Shindig, ran in network prime time. Beyond the froth, however, young people were demanding new things from politics, too—a field of endeavor now conceived not merely as the place where interest groups pragmatically jostled for resources to meet their material needs, but, just as Arthur Schlesinger had predicted in 1960, as a realm devoted to the fight “for individual dignity, identity and fulfillment in an affluent society.”

The spirit came from the left. In May, as Republicans dueled to the death in California, a group of folkies called Peter, Paul and Mary won a Grammy for singing “Blowin' in the Wind” and one thousand young men and women marched on the UN to assail “U.S. imperialism.” Students for a Democratic Society was just breaking into public consciousness (their campaign slogan was “Part of the Way with LBJ”). A young man had recently burned his draft card in Union Square in New York City, declaring, “The basic issue is my right of free choice.” And, as Young Americans for Freedom amply demonstrated—it won 5,400 new recruits in the summer of 1964, compared to SDS's total
membership of 1,500—this spirit came from the right. As one young Birch leader described it, his conversion to conservative politics came in a flash, when he realized that “the man in the gray flannel suit was a devil in disguise.” Which is to say that, politically, the generation seemed up for grabs.

Goldwater made a decent play for it in Prescott. “Republicans will end the draft altogether,” he promised, “and as soon as possible!” He made this statement in part to drop the “warmonger” tag, in part because in his opinion the draft was an inefficient and expensive way to build an army. (The Pentagon was completing studies that strained toward the same conclusion; the thinking was that modern brushfire wars like Vietnam—“We're back to the days of Indian fighting,” Goldwater once noted—wouldn't require mass deployments of soldiers.) But it was also a question of freedom: people should become soldiers because they chose to, just like the kid in Union Square said. “We will place power back to the people,” as Goldwater would put it later that month.

Lyndon Johnson had made his play for the new generation back in May. It was Eric Goldman, a Princeton history professor on leave to serve as a White House special assistant, who came up with the tag “Great Society”—a vision of dignity, identity, and fulfillment in the affluent society—to bestow upon the Johnson program. The President first auditioned the phrase in April before the Democratic Club of Cook County. He had to shout to get the their attention: “We have been called upon—are you listening?—to build a great society of the highest order.” To the hacks of the old school this was not politics; it was gibberish. Those who attended the commencement exercises on May 22, six months to the day after Kennedy's assassination, at the University of Michigan—where, in 1961, JFK had unveiled the Peace Corps—proved a more receptive audience. It wouldn't last long. But for a brief, shining moment, fifty-five-year-old Lyndon Johnson and these thousands of robed young grads dreaming of futures of individual dignity, identity, and fulfillment in an affluent society were thinking exactly the same thing.

“The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use our wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of American civilization,” their President declaimed.

The old ways of talking about politics were falling away. In their place, both candidates would serve up rhetoric that autumn that tingled with strains of utopianism—intercut with equal and opposite strains of apocalypticism. They told stories of hope, of a society that could not but surpass any the world had ever known. They also told stories that spoke to the dark, looming fear that the world bequeathed us by science, technology, and the Pax Americana would not make us more secure but might instead unleash the devil.

 

A melancholy man, Lyndon Johnson understood how souls were moved by dark thoughts that crept up on sleepless nights. “Men worry about heart attacks,” he would say, clasping his chest. “Women worry about cancer of the tit” (here he jabbed the breastplate of his nearest companion). “But everybody worries about war and peace. Everything else is chickenshit.”

The strategy, as it evolved through August, was for the President to take care of the chickenshit. He would campaign from the Rose Garden, pronounce upon the unprecedented good fortune being enjoyed by all, venture out once in a while before safe Union crowds, cut a ribbon or dedicate a dam, swoop down upon flood-stricken towns bearing multimillion-dollar checks.

That left the dark thoughts that crept up during sleepless nights. Which was where Doyle Dane Bernbach came in. When DDB scrapped its civil rights spots in favor of the kids-with-two-heads theme, it was Tony Schwartz whom they called upon. Schwartz was a sui generis American genius, a sculptor in sound, a manufacturer of moods. He was the inventor of the first portable tape recorder, with which he took to the streets to produce LPs that were celebrations of all things audible: cabdrivers' chatter, Times Square at rush hour, Jamaican songs sung by a shop girl at Macy's. He also produced commercials. His masterpiece was a series of radio spots for American Airlines. He sold the romance of America's great cities by crafting the aural equivalent of skylines. For one spot, Schwartz waited for an overcast day in his West Side Manhattan neighborhood and recorded Hudson River foghorns while hiring a local hobo called Moondog to walk around with the bells, drums, and pots and pans he perpetually carried on his back: instant San Francisco. The commercials brought an immediate spike in the airline's bookings.

Schwartz was also a maestro in the use of children in advertising. Enraptured
by the sound of play, he had a special fascination with the intricate street games children played with numbers—cold, austere symbols, breathed life through the mouths of babes.

When DDB producer Aaron Ehrlich held up a picture and asked Schwartz, “Would you work for this product?” Schwartz, who was also a committed antinuclear activist, said he would be thrilled. They began to brainstorm. Schwartz brought an audiotape he had created for Ogilvy, Benson & Mather's IBM account that had proved too much for those two stodgy old firms. He played the segment and suggested how it might be adapted to their purposes. He described the visuals:
“You have a little girl in the middle of afield....
”